Most people see the outcome of an executive search.
A shortlist. A final interview. An appointment.
What they don’t always see is the work that happens before those names ever reach the table.
We recently completed a Chief Revenue Officer search for a global fintech software business undergoing significant leadership and organisational change.
The search began without a job description and ultimately resulted in two preferred profiles.
What happened between those two points is a useful illustration of what a structured executive search actually involves – and why the quality of the outcome is often determined long before the first candidate conversation takes place.
It Started With the Business, Not the Job Description
When we were first engaged, there was no completed job specification.
Instead, the process began with a 55-minute conversation about the business.
The organisation had been through a significant period of transformation. Its senior leadership structure was evolving, its operating model had changed and the next CRO would be joining at an important point in that journey.
So before discussing candidate names, we needed to understand the context surrounding the appointment.
Where was the business going?
What had changed?
What did the commercial organisation need to achieve next?
Where had previous approaches worked – and where had they created challenges?
And what role did the next CRO need to play within the wider leadership team?
One phrase from that initial conversation captured the requirement particularly clearly:
“This is a seat at the table. This is a seat at the senior leadership table.”
That immediately told us something important.
The business wasn’t simply looking for someone capable of managing a revenue number.
It needed a commercial leader who could contribute to the direction of the wider organisation.
Turning Context Into a Mandate
The next stage was translating that business context into something that could actually guide a search.
At executive level, a job description alone rarely gives you enough information to do that.
It can tell you what sits within someone’s remit.
It doesn’t necessarily tell you what will make someone successful in that particular organisation.
That’s why the brief became the foundation for a broader capability framework.
Rather than asking only whether someone had held the right title or worked for the right organisation, we needed to understand the evidence behind their experience.
The framework spanned commercial track record, leadership capability, operating discipline and strategic contribution – each assessed through the evidence behind someone’s experience, not simply the titles they had held or the organisations they had worked for.
Defining those dimensions before entering the market gave the search a consistent reference point.
We knew what we were looking for before individual candidates had the opportunity to influence our perception of what “good” looked like.
Understanding the Market Before Approaching It
With the mandate defined, the research process could go deeper.
Before outreach began, we built a picture of the relevant market.
- Who was operating in the space?
- Where was the strongest relevant talent sitting?
- Which organisations were producing leaders with comparable experience?
- Who might consider moving for the right opportunity?
- What did compensation look like?
And where were the gaps between what someone appeared to offer on paper and what they could actually deliver within this particular business?
That work fed into a structured market intelligence picture covering the geographic distribution of credible talent, the source organisations most likely to produce leaders with the right profile, how compensation at this level compared to what organisations typically budget – and where the gap between what someone presented on paper and what they could actually deliver in this specific context was likely to be widest.
The objective wasn’t to create the longest possible list of executives.
It was to understand the market well enough to identify the right universe of potential candidates – and to enter that market with a view, not a question.
“A shortlist of two looks simple. Behind it is a picture of an entire market – who is in it, who is performing, who could move and what it will genuinely take to secure them. At executive level, ‘what it takes’ is rarely just commercial. Personal circumstances, timing, the kind of environment someone needs at this point in their life – these factors become more significant the higher the pressure of the role. Understanding them isn’t a soft consideration. It’s what separates a shortlist from an appointment.”
– Joyce McCarthy, Head of Research at EC1 Executive
Knowing the market before approaching it changes how every subsequent conversation unfolds – and this is particularly true in a confidential executive search.
The outgoing leader had significant relationships across the industry, so discretion mattered throughout the process.
Outreach was approached with the care a confidential search demands – protecting the interests of the organisation, the individuals involved and the integrity of the process at every stage.
Building Assessment Into the Search
Market intelligence tells you where to look.
It doesn’t, on its own, tell you who should progress.
Alongside the research, we compiled an interview scorecard designed around the requirements established during the initial brief.
That meant candidates could be assessed consistently as the search progressed.
Rather than relying on an overall impression of whether someone was a “strong candidate”, the process returned to the same evidence-based questions at every stage – focused on what someone had demonstrably done, how they had led through complexity and what their operating approach looked like in practice.
This matters because executive candidates rarely look identical.
One individual may bring greater scale.
Another may have deeper sector experience.
One may offer exceptional functional expertise.
Another may bring broader strategic exposure.
A structured framework allows those differences to be assessed against what the business actually needs rather than simply against one another.
Arriving at the Shortlist
As the process progressed, the market narrowed. Candidates were considered against the same mandate and assessed through the same core framework. Ultimately, the search arrived at two preferred profiles – and the contrast between them was instructive.
Profile A was a senior commercial leader from a major financial data and analytics platform. She had managed an $825M+ client business across the Americas, led a team of approximately 200 people and sat on the regional leadership team. Over more than two decades, she had built a consistent record of outperformance on large, complex commercial relationships. Her ability to manage at scale – and retain the confidence of senior customers through periods of change – was among the strongest we assessed.
The question the process surfaced wasn’t about capability. It was about translation. The sales motion in financial data and information services – relationship-intensive, long-cycle, renewal-led – is meaningfully different in character from the motion required in enterprise software, which combines relationship depth with a higher-velocity, product-driven component. Whether that shift was achievable in the timeframe this business required remained a genuine open question at the point of shortlist.
Profile B had scaled a software business from $500M to $1.3B ARR and redesigned its operating model in the process. He had led a cross-functional organisation of more than 450 people, acted as regional president across a $200M P&L and advised his board on commercial strategy, pricing and M&A. Over a ten-year period, he had developed ten people into SVP-level roles.
What distinguished Profile B wasn’t the scale alone. It was the breadth. The combination of revenue growth, operating model redesign, P&L ownership and board-level advisory capacity placed him at the intersection of CRO and something closer to a Chief Commercial Officer with genuine strategic influence. Of the candidates we assessed, he came closest to what the CEO had described at the outset as “a seat at the table.”
That gave the client something more useful than a collection of impressive CVs. It gave them a structured comparison – two credible but different ways of answering the same requirement, assessed against the same criteria, with the basis for the decision documented and clear.
Where was each individual strongest? Where did their experience differ? What trade-offs did each profile represent? And, ultimately, which combination of experience, leadership and strategic capability best aligned with what the business needed next?
The objective of an executive search isn’t to remove judgement from a senior hiring decision. It’s to give that judgement a stronger foundation.
What the Process Revealed
There was another outcome from the search beyond the shortlist itself.
The process created greater clarity around the mandate.
The CRO role had initially been defined around a significant commercial leadership requirement.
But as the brief was interrogated, the market mapped and candidates assessed, the importance of broader strategic contribution became increasingly clear.
Revenue leadership remained fundamental.
But so did the ability to influence the wider organisation, contribute at executive level and connect commercial growth with the direction of the business.
The market intelligence also confirmed something worth stating plainly: at this level, compensation is not a negotiating variable. It is a filtering mechanism. The gap between what the strongest candidates require and what organisations initially budget for this type of role is rarely small – and it is not closed by brand, mission or equity upside. It determines who you can access before a single conversation takes place.
That clarity didn’t come from rewriting a job description.
It came from the search process itself.
And that’s an important part of executive hiring that can be overlooked.
Sometimes a search validates exactly what an organisation thought it needed.
Sometimes it sharpens it.
And sometimes seeing credible but different leaders against the same framework helps a business articulate the trade-offs it couldn’t see when the role existed only on paper.
The Process Is the Search
Executive search is often judged by its most visible output: the shortlist.
But the shortlist is the product of everything that happened before it.
- Understanding the business.
- Diagnosing the mandate.
- Defining the capabilities.
- Mapping the market.
- Building the assessment framework.
- Approaching the right people.
- Assessing consistently.
- Comparing the strongest profiles.
Each stage informs the next.
And by the time two preferred candidates reach the final stage, the organisation should have more than two names to choose between.
It should have a clearer understanding of the market, a stronger definition of the mandate and an evidence-led basis for making one of its most consequential leadership decisions.
The shortlist is the outcome.
The process is the search.
EC1 Executive specialises in senior leadership appointments across financial technology and enterprise software. This search has been anonymised to protect the confidentiality of the organisation and individuals involved.
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